ult, and bringing the smell of corruption along with it.
He spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that
would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity,
with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one
great, mutually conscious brotherhood. He described (in a strange,
philosophical guise, with terms of art, as if it were a matter of
chemical discovery) the agency by which this mighty result was to be
effected; nor would it have surprised me, had he pretended to hold up a
portion of his universally pervasive fluid, as he affirmed it to be, in
a glass phial.

At the close of his exordium, the Professor beckoned with his
hand,--once, twice, thrice,--and a figure came gliding upon the
platform, enveloped in a long veil of silvery whiteness. It fell about
her like the texture of a summer cloud, with a kind of vagueness, so
that the outline of the form beneath it could not be accurately
discerned. But the movement of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and
unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to be the spectacle of
thousands; or, possibly, a blindfold prisoner within the sphere with
which this dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was wholly
unconscious of being the central object to all those straining eyes.

Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious courtesy, but at
the same time a remarkable decisiveness), the figure placed itself in
the great chair. Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it was,
perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as
anything that stage trickery could devise. The hushed breathing of the
spectators proved how high-wrought were their anticipations of the
wonders to be performed through the medium of this incomprehensible
creature. I, too, was in breathless suspense, but with a far different
presentiment of some strange event at hand.

"You see before you the Veiled Lady," said the bearded Professor,
advancing to the verge of the platform. "By the agency of which I have
just spoken, she is at this moment in communion with the spiritual
world. That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment, having been
dipped, as it were, and essentially imbued, through the potency of my
art, with the fluid medium of spirits. Slight and ethereal as it
seems, the limitations of time and space have no existence within its
folds. This hall--these hundreds of faces, encompassing her within so
n